His Touch With Steel Is Golden Engineer Makes Jewelry, Sculpture Of Molten Metal

September 15, 1986|By Ruth Rasche of The Sentinel Staff

COCOA BEACH — Dick Englehart is an aerospace engineer by profession, but his passion is art.

Every day after he puts in his eight hours at Boeing Aerospace Operations, Englehart returns to his Cocoa Beach artist's studio to do the work he really loves -- fashioning jewelry and sculpture out of molten stainless steel.

In his ''real'' job at Boeing, Englehart works on the inertial upper stage program for the space shuttle.

''The IUS program puts payloads into higher orbit than the shuttle will take them,'' Englehart explained.

When he is not at work or creating art, Englehart surfs. At 54, he proudly claims to be one of the oldest surfers in Brevard.

While surfing, Englehart wears one of the necklaces he designed. The piece, which stands out prominently against his dark tan, has a gold-plated stainless steel shark's tooth dangling from it. Englehart molded the tooth from one taken from a shark he caught just off the shores of Cocoa Beach a few years ago.

Englehart, an engineering graduate of Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, moved to Brevard in the mid-1960s when the Apollo program began. He worked for Grumman Corp. on the lunar excursion module, the jeeplike vehicle driven on the moon. ''My signature is on the moon,'' Englehart said. ''Not many people can say that.'' Everyone who worked on the module signed a card that accompanied the vehicle, he said. At that time he began fooling around with woodcarving in his spare moments.

Englehart was laid off at the end of the Apollo program, and after he was unable to find work as an engineer, he started selling his woodcarvings to craft houses in New York. For almost four years, Englehart made a living that way.

Then he returned to Brevard and went to work for Planning Research Corp. as the chief designer of propellants for the space shuttle. Seven years later, he was laid off again. This time he made ends meet by making commemorative engraved coins of the Apollo program.

''That's really when I started with jewelry,'' he said. ''I got used to working with small things, but gold and silver prices were so high at the time, I had about $10,000 always wrapped up in the metals alone.

''I figured there had to be a better metal to work with,'' Englehart said. ''I'd worked with stainless steel on the propellants, so I decided to start casting jewelry in stainless. Most people said it couldn't be done.''

Englehart began working with materials normally used with platinum, another extremely hard metal, and developed the method of jewelry-making he still uses today. First he draws a design on paper, carves it in plastic and then uses a wax pot to shoot the wax into the carved plastic mold.

Next he encases the mold in a plaster of Parislike substance and puts it in an oven to melt the wax. Finally he uses an Italian cast metal machine that uses a combination of centrifugal force and a vacuum to force 3,000-degree stainless into the mold. The last step is polishing the metal.

When he decided he wanted his stainless pieces to look like gold, Englehart developed a gold-plating process by formulating his own plating fluid.

''My engineering background helped me do this,'' he said. ''I don't know of anyone else in the country who makes stainless steel jewelry, much less gold- plated stainless.''

While working on the shuttle, Englehart often got scrap material destined for the dump and converted it into jewelry. Once, when some piping was being replaced on the shuttle Columbia, he was given a piece of the pipe.

''Now I melt it down and throw a little in each batch of stainless so I can tell people some of the metal in my jewelry has been up in orbit,'' he said.

Englehart hopes that after one more year as an engineer, he can retire and work on his art full time.

''Making jewelry is sort of therapy,'' he said. ''I really enjoy doing it. I just listen to good music ranging from Tchaikovsky to Pink Floyd and forget about the rest of the world.''

Englehart will be selling his artwork Oct. 4-5 at the Cocoa Village Art Show; Oct. 25-26 at the Ocala Art Show; Nov. 1-2 at the Ormond Beach Art Festival; and Nov. 29-30 at the St. Augustine Art Show.